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What definition are we to give to Eternity?
Can it be identified with the [divine or] Intellectual Substance
itself?
This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of Heavens
and Earth- an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its
adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something
most august; most august, too, is the Intellectual Kind; and
there is no possibility of saying that the one is more majestic
than the other, since no such degrees can be asserted in the
Above-World; there is therefore a certain excuse for the
identification- all the more since the Intellectual Substance and
Eternity have the one scope and content.
Still; by the fact of representing the one as contained within
the other, by making Eternity a predicate to the Intellectual
Existents- "the Nature of the Exemplar," we read, "is eternal"-
we cancel the identification; Eternity becomes a separate thing,
something surrounding that Nature or lying within it or present
to it. And the majestic quality of both does not prove them
identical: it might be transmitted from the one to the other. So,
too, Eternity and the Divine Nature envelop the same entities,
yes; but not in the same way: the Divine may be thought of as
enveloping parts, Eternity as embracing its content in an
unbroken whole, with no implication of part, but merely from the
fact that all eternal things are so by conforming to it.
May we, perhaps, identify Eternity with Repose-There as Time has
been identified with Movement-Here?
This would bring on the counter-question whether Eternity is
presented to us as Repose in the general sense or as the Repose
that envelops the Intellectual Essence.
On the first supposition we can no more talk of Repose being
eternal than of Eternity being eternal: to be eternal is to
participate in an outside thing, Eternity.
Further, if Eternity is Repose, what becomes of Eternal Movement,
which, by this identification, would become a thing of Repose?
Again, the conception of Repose scarcely seems to include that of
perpetuity- I am speaking of course not of perpetuity in the
time-order (which might follow on absence of movement) but of
that which we have in mind when we speak of Eternity.
If, on the other hand, Eternity is identified with the Repose of
the divine Essence, all species outside of the divine are put
outside of Eternity.
Besides, the conception of Eternity requires not merely Repose
but also unity- and, in order to keep it distinct from Time, a
unity including interval- but neither that unity nor that absence
of interval enters into the conception of Repose as such.
Lastly, this unchangeable Repose in unity is a predicate asserted
of Eternity, which, therefore, is not itself Repose, the
absolute, but a participant in Repose.
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